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Friday, 11 December 2015

Cisco, a fortune 100 company, and a 100 best companies to work for in 2015, has the largest workforce in India, outside of US. Indian workforce is fairly young, and growing at the rapid pace.With addition of new employees every quarter, effective employee engagement & bonding is an important area for Cisco HR Team.Cisco initiated Step-a-thon event in 2015, to address this concern. Cisco believes in its power of networked technologies & human collaboration. Hence, Step-a-thon was designed on this theme to deliver employee engagement & wellness. GetActive - a connected wearable technology solution platform from 2mpower Health Management Services, was identified and then deployed to achieve this objective.

Step-a-thon @Cisco was designed to be an online interactive gamification program. Focus was on three key aspects -

Technology,

Large # of employee participation from across the locations, and

Rewards through competition.

The hypothesis was that the team dynamics, social component and instant feedback on performance would play a major role in people engagement & positive behavior change. Network technologies were exploited to get the biggest impact in the following manner:

Simple online data collection mechanism, just plug-in and upload

Social aspect – participants were watched by their peers online, every time

Team dynamics – participants would want their team to stay ahead

Competition & associated rewards

"We were amazed to see 98% employee participation (1,772 engaged employees), when we launched the program in January 2015. And more importantly, 65% of these employees demonstrated improvement in physical activity post 100 days of event", says Ranjana Keshavan, Lead Employee Benefits Program.

Program matrix & success resulted in recognition for Step-a-thon, as the best employee engagement program in Cisco Inc. And Step-a-thon 2.0 has already commenced, with more employee participation.